WDC Black Problem [ Edited ]

[cliff90]

Hi,

i have serious problem with my WDC Caviar Black 1 TB as it's always makes my PC unresponsive.

i bought it about a year and half ago and since then i splitted it to 2 partition, 350GB for Windows (C and the rest of it for my personal files (D. i don't have any problem with it before, there's some constant noise ('click' or 'tick', i don't know exactly) when booting to Windows or when copying some files, but i thought it's normal.

the problem started about a week ago, just about 3 minutes after successfully login to Windows, all of sudden my PC starts unresponsive. so i restart my PC but it gets a lot of time before finally reach login screen. after that there's nothing i can do because any programs i opened ended up with 'not responding' status. i can hear the click/tick sounds, but it's like there's 1 second interval between it, it's like click-> silent->click and so on. sometimes i can't hear it at all, just like the drive stops spinning.

I found the way out by inserting the Windows DVD, boot from it and choose repair my computer. after my Windows partition detected by Startup Repair and then choose restart, it seems i can boot normally into Windows (the constant  noise came back, since then i thought the constant noise is indicating the drive is working). but after a couple of minutes in Windows then it starting to unresponsive again. I did the Startup Repair a lot of times because this problem keeps happening again and again. right now Startup Repair can't help with it anymore, it still takes a lot of time to boot, or just stuck in splash screen.

I have replaced the SATA cable, change the SATA Port, change power cable fom my PSU, but it doesn't solve it. I haven't test the drive with Data Lifeguard Diagnostic (CD) because it always shows "Disk Error, Press Any Key to Restart" everytime i boot from it. but I have performed sfc, Startup Repair, chkdsk multiple times and it seems the chkdsk detects a bad sectors on my drive. The last times i performed chkdsk (with command prompt from Windows DVD) showing 40 KB bad sectors on C: and surprisingly 2072 KB on D:. there's another error on Volume Bitmap, but looks like already corrected by chkdsk, as far as i can tell fom the log.

I thought the problem is because a lot of bad sectors on D:, so i format it and hope the problem's gone. but i was wrong, even there's only C: partition left, the problem still exist. I'm not some kind of expert about this but i think there's 2 possibilities :

- The drive starts failing as it stops working / spinning.

but i don't see this happening on chkdsk, the drive seems to be fine and finish the check at reasonable time.

why this is only happening at boot and in Windows?

- The bad sectors causing this.

40KB of bad sectors messing up all 350GB on C: partition? is it possible?

if there's any way to solve it, or at least somehow makes it normally works for a couple of minutes for copying my unbackup files from the C: partition, please let me know.

i'm sorry for my English and the long post.

[ricochet]

Greetings,

I would suggest slaving this drive in another system before attempting to copy data from it.  This may or may not be possible based on your description, but certainly worth a try.  In addition, when copying files, you may have to do it in small increments, but see what you can get using htis method. 

[cliff90]

Hi,

sorry for the late reply.

i've tried test the drive on another PC before, and it makes the PC stuck before reach login screen.

but i think the problem gone for now, i boot the PC and left it for about an hour. i can successfully logon into Windows and then i left it again for an about 7 hours. it seems normal now, i already test shutdown and restart my PC multiple times and there's seems to be normal just like before. i don't know, maybe an excessive chkdsk tests can actually causing the problem?

i haven't try to backup my files though, there's a lot of worry that the problem will come back when i'm copying my files.

how many MBs/GBs you would suggest for each copy process performed?